Alchemy
Alchemy is an academic discipline compassing the creation of mystical Potions. The corresponding Skill for characters is abbreviated Alch. The skills in Darklands are: Overview Brewing potions will necessitate the party making a circuit of the commercial and academic centers of Germany, with this general plan in mind: * Having a character with passable academic and interpersonal skills to get started; * Obtaining the formulas; * Obtaining training in the Alch skill; * Upgrading the party's Philosopher's Stone; * Gathering ingredients, and/or locating cities that sell all the ingredients to a known recipe; * Learning about saints that can boost Alch or even better, Int; To pay for all this, the party needs to draw on existing resources and brew intermediate potions for profit. For its part, advanced alchemy is immensely profitable. Potion Creation Orders to create a batch of potions can be issued during camping/residence. The formula for success is: % Chance = k + PhStone + Int + Alch - MagicNumber The Magic Number is the recipe's difficulty and is subtracted from the chance of success. Each point of PhStone, Int, and Alch corresponds with a one-point increase to the success rate. k''' is a variable, a "base chance," that starts at 100 and decreases exponentially for attempting batches greater than 3 potions, according to the table below: It is strongly recommended to camp overland, and not reside in a city's Inn, when creating any-sized batch of any sort of potion. Even recipes that avow themselves "Low Risk" can blow up the inn if they fail. Therefore, performing alchemy in cities' inns over a long term will eventually lead to legal difficulties. Potion List The table below is a list of the potions in Darklands, their in-game descriptive text, and links to their main articles. The 22 named Potions in this table each have three tiers of quality, for a total of 66 individual recipes. Profit Guide Overview If the party scours the land for useful recipes and keeps a record of places where key ingredients are sold, alchemy can be very profitable. Margins on 45q potions are especially high, but those formulas are tougher to find and execute. The table later in this section considers the recipes in terms of profitability, both proportionally and in raw coin gained per unit. When poor, pursue recipes with a good percentage-wise margin when possible, and keep the number of batches low to prevent failure. When rich, experienced, and aided by the Saints, it becomes more realistic to make big batches of a product with a high raw payoff per unit (the '''Pfennigs column), reckoning that while big batches and hard recipes can fail, math will prevail in the end. The maximum number of batches overnight for one character is 255, should that become relevant. The Cost column is the price of the ingredients. Ingredients have rarity values that are very important in determining what is on offer from the foreign traders and herbalist at the Markt. While big cities charge slightly more for rare ingredients, they really are the only consistent source of ingredients at all. The biggest (size 8) is Köln, followed by the size 7 cities of Danzig, Hamburg, Lübeck, Nürnberg, Stassburg, and Ulm. The Sale Value column uses 40 Chr as a baseline for the character holding the purse. Then, what matters is the size of the location to which the goods are being sold. Eight potions are considered by the game to be "common" and are therefore most profitable when sold at a tiny location. For these, the sale value listed is for a chance merchant caravan encounter. The other fourteen potions are considered "rare." Their sale values are what is offered by merchants in Köln. Since all potioneering is risky, always camp out in the open country to brew potions, rather than blow up a city's inn. Table Recommendations Recipes for all the quality levels of the first 7 potions on the table above (which lists potions by their internal index order) are commonly sold by Alchemists. Most of those recipes are easy to perform and useful, but hard to get rich on. The most accessible potion is Noxious Aroma (save some for wolves!). With extensive training, the 45q Ironarm, Sunburst, and Firewall formulas are the biggest money-makers taking into consideration the odds of being able to brew large quantities of them at a time. Take note of any city found selling all of the ingredients to one of these. 45q Black Cloud and Essence o'Grace are nearly as good, and their materials are more widespread. Arabian Fire, Breath of Death, and Transformation have the highest margins, but they are impossible to produce in bulk and too powerful an asset for the party. Saints A party member can make use of a blessing for two days by praying in the afternoon and camping for two days back-to-back. Intelligence boosts are particularly valuable because it cannot normally be improved, so the party should stay on the lookout for saints who boost this attribute. :*''' ''St. Giles of Portugal''' has been documented to wound the target character, reducing Str and/or End by 1 permanently. As far as can be ascertained, this is not the case. The saint deals 1 point of combat damage to the target's Str and reduces Virt by 1 point. Both can be gained back.'' :** The data for '''Paul the Apostle' and Paul the Simple are switched in-game, causing the blessings of these saints to be pretty much the opposite of what is documented and expected, especially so considering their epithets.'' Ingredients Table Only}} Ingredients in Darklands are sold as tiny, portable samples, always at 25q. A few 35q samples can be found during quests, but the quality does not affect the resulting potions. The prices for ingredients are given in the second section below, in a range that a character with 40 Chr can expect to pay, depending on the size of the vendor's location and the rarity of the compound. Quantity Chart Descriptions Category:Skills Category:Article stubs Category:World Information